Homeless issue is our community's choice

By Brittany Owens

A blog that I monitor called “Only In San Francisco” feeds me photos and musings from the obscure corners of the city. Among the entries is usually some quip about homelessness.

The pictures that appear on my screen often call for consideration. Most of the time they are pictures of the homeless sleeping behind cars or sidewalks. Rarely do they show the human side of these people.

The fact that we are even able to say homeless and add the suffix, -ness, to make it a condition, startles me. Is homelessness a condition and can it be cured? Have we become that immune to what is dark, decrepit and sad, like the graffiti that is scattered across the city?

The homeless have become a different dialect of Americana; we have panhandlers — people who devote the entire day to hustling tourists and the like. Then we have the buskers — the musicians, who are subsequently stationed in convenient locations for tourist and commuters. Then there are hippies, squatters, bums and hobos. All of them are homeless, but each a different ethnicity of homelessness.

On any cold, foggy night in San Francisco you can ask one of our national attractions — the street wanderers — for directions. Not only can these people tell you where to go, but they can accurately predict the unpredictable weather that they have become so familiar with.

I have a friend who is by definition, homeless. He wears the same dingy clothes everyday. He is unkempt and occasionally, when I can afford to spare change without putting myself at risk of being homeless, I give him a couple of bucks.

He walks up and down Ninth Street in the South of Market area where there is a large concentration of the homeless population. He looks like Flavor Flav and sometimes can be seen with a huge broken clock around his neck. If you holler out the moniker “Flav,” he'll respond with a complete stop and spout one of
the Flav’s many infamous lines.

Recently, the SF Weekly ran a cover story about homeless SF state students. As a journalism student, I was firstly shocked that the paper was able to scoop the Xpress. Second, I was even more taken aback that at SF State with all the discussion about fee increases and freshman housing, we miss the obvious — homelessness of our students, in our community.

We have a culture here in San Francisco that is ready to ignore the homeless issue, but readily feeds it by giving the homeless exactly what they want. If I could choose to be homeless like the people in last week’s SF Weekly, I would definitely choose the city that is all about hippie/different culture and has an active tourist population. It would provide me as a homeless person with comfort in knowing that we are big in numbers.

According to Marlon Mendieta, program director of the Dolores Housing Program, a shelter in San Francisco, Latino day laborers in San Francisco are primarily homeless.

That’s right, just throw everything out you thought about the homeless. Some people like the subjects of last week’s SF Weekly choose to be homeless, while others do work and just can’t afford even affordable housing.

Being homeless is deliberate, on the part of the homeless and on the part of the people who are running this country. No other explanation seems possible when the financial resources are available.

Mayor Gavin Newsom has made a program for the city called Care Not Cash. Under this program there are 325 beds made available to the thousands of homeless in the city. But according to the Dolores Housing Program, our target population typically does not participate in programs such as Care not Cash, and therefore cannot access shelter beds and single room occupancy units connected to such programs.

Even the homeless have their bureaucracy.

I’ve walked the streets of San Francisco now for four years. And never in a place so vibrant with life, color and cultures have I seen the social state of the community in such shambles.

It is as though the hustle and bustle of the city walks indignantly past the “other” community.

In contemporary philosophy, the late John Rawls even wonders about society's overall decree for community. “The communitarian critique of liberalism bemoans its focus on atomistic individuals instead of communities,” Rawls said.

If we live in such a liberal society, how can we disregard the homeless to such a low humanitarian level?